History (and commonsense) warn us that decadence yields directly to anarchy. When a nihilistic citizenry is only capable of looking after its own self-interests then there is no agreement on anything, there is only zero sum rent-seeking, campaigning, and stagnation. There are no shared values or common causes to build upon, merely constant petty bickering and lack of progress in every direction. Sound familiar? It should because it's the overriding reason why this decadent society is like a 400 pound fat man who can't get out of his own way. The veneration of greed and self-interest has created a culture of exploitation that has cannibalized the entire economy starting from the bottom and working its way to the very top. The billionaire beneficiaries and their frat boy flunkies will be the VERY LAST to figure out that this is all going away, to be replaced by a model not of their choosing...
The cult of self-interest has led us to an inevitable dead-end. There is no way forward from here, we are down a blind alley where the only choices are minor incremental measures while we wait for total collapse. As Paul Kennedy first warned us over two decades ago, eventually consumption will crowd out all other considerations - savings, real investment, research and development. Human progress comes to a stand still.
The cult of self-interest had to be invented as an ideology, so that it would have a thin veneer of respectability allowing it to be packaged and sold to the masses who lapped it up like gravy. It was a phony ideology recycled by Neocon boy-men whose nuts had shriveled down to the size of frozen peas. An entire mass media genre was built around this self-absorbed and conflicted belief that we could all look after only ourselves and everything would turn out just fine. Now, fast forward several decades and we've become a society of fucking refugees only interested in our own immediate self-gratification with no common values or structure to bind us together. Where are the higher values? Where is the sense of mutual shared interest? Consumed.
Worse yet, as the Dark Ages proved, decadence leads to anarchy as base instincts override that which is good and virtuous. Those pathetic fragments of good and virtue that remain today will be swept away as if they never existed once the hungry hordes are unleashed into the wild, left to fend for themselves. The "institutions" of yesterday have been whittled down to ever-diminished foodstamp dispensers. Sociopathic corporations consumed everything in their path, leaving nothing in their wake. The real economy is gone. Corporations destroyed their own end-market aka. the middle class, in their sociopathic drive for ever-greater profit. Their illusory historically inflated profits are merely a function of silly amounts of fiscal and monetary stimulus in conjunction with mass outsourcing - a triangulation that has completely bypassed the real economy. We are just waiting for Wall Street to realize that the party is over and the lights are already on. And let's not delude ourselves that the Taliban haven't taken notice, they are the new barbarians. They are watching the crippled First world like a hawk watches wounded prey - biding their time. They play the long game, while our military "strategists" dink around like Milton Bradley. The new barbarians see us pumping our kids full of corporate toxic waste food-like substance in the name of the fake idol of consumer choice. It's weakness masquerading as false bravado. Demented hubris on an epic scale.
What size crater will be left behind by the impending sudden impact? What remnants of civility will be left intact and allow us to build upon?
That is the real question.
